It would be much more sensible should Mrs. Granger here strike the immoral old lady, instead of saving her blows for her cur of a husband, in the last act, who, after all, was the "father of her boys." But she listens to her. She appears actually in doubt not only as to which course she will pursue, but which she should pursue. She is intended by the dramatist as a pitiable object because on the one hand she feels it right to save an innocent man (whom she has begun to love), and on the other feels it her duty to save her sons' happiness by building their future on a structure of lies and deceit. And she reaches a solution, not by reasoning the tangle out, not by any real thought for her boys, their general moral welfare, not by any attention to principles, but simply by discovering that her husband has been sexually unfaithful to her. Further, he becomes a cad and charges her with infidelity. Then she springs upon him and beats him with her fists, which is not the most effective way of convincing an audience that she was a woman capable of being torn by moral problems.
Of course as the play is written, there is no moral problem. The morality is all of the theatre. It belongs to that strange world behind the proscenium, wherein we gaze, and gazing sometimes utter chatter about "strong situations," "stirring climaxes," and the like, as people hypnotized. There might have been a moral problem if Mrs. Granger, before she discovered her husband's guilt, had been forced to fight a rising tide of passion for Temple in her own heart. There might have been a moral problem after the discovery and her first hasty, but natural, destruction of the letter, if she had felt that her desire to save Temple was prompted by a passion still illicit, rather than by justice. But no such real problems were presented. The lady babbles eternally of "saving her boys' good name," while you are supposed to weep for her plight. Unless you have checked your sense of reality in the cloak room, you scorn her perceptions and despise her standards. How much finer had she continued to love her husband! But he, after all, was only the "father of her boys."[19]
It is insufficiently motivated characterization which Mr. Eaton censures in _The Nigger_: